Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Dragon Quest 1 Remake is now completely free of ANY scripting issues to my knowledge, so I'm currently tweaking balance to accommodate for all the finalized scripting, which includes the following changes.

* Much like the original Dragon Quest, the player is limited to 9 of any particular item (more can be added to the bank/storage), and any extra (that are not key items) are automatically discarded, which means that increased use of the alchemy system to refine surplus ingredients into new items would be recommended, though the same limit applies to them. This also affect game difficulty, it's now slightly harder for the player to rely on healing items to carry them through most of the game, depending on player levels and game progress.

* All Small Medal shops have gotten a tweak dependent on location, which means the more out of the way the shop is from the game start, the items available and prices will be more/different, so hoarding Medals until late game may prove profitable for some rare goods.

* The original Dragon Quest had a massive difficulty boost around the Catilin area, and my game will not make many exceptions to this, and currently tweaking balance to be to the point it's expected the player has some idea what they are doing, even on Story difficulty..

* Every item, weapon, and armor has a unique icon when previewed in the menu.

* Some late game areas require some extra art assets I do not either have on hand or have not formatted for use in my game at this time, so the beta will for this build will end roughly after doing everything available in the Catilin area. Currently about 80-90% finished before closed beta release, mostly need to finish a few final areas, tweak balance to be consistent, and test out all events in the Catilin area for possible issues.

* Once I have the beta ready for closed beta testing, I will contact them and send them a passworded link to the beta. I will still offer this via my OneDrive account, but the public build and all previous builds will be moved to a MEGA account (or equivalent file service) for easy downloading.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

I have spoken with this individual on the #ncr chatroom of /cow/ a few times, and based on what I know of him during these interactions, his Kiwi Farm thread, and interactions that he has had in other fora, I'll just say this for starters.

He's a fool playing at brilliance.

For starters, he seems to think autism confers a superior status to him, making him a "superior man", or "ubermensch". As someone who has read up on Nietzsche, I'm willing to bet Friedrich himself would give Autphag a huge look of annoyed disgust, given he did a LOT of railing against pseudo-intellectuals and considered them the "untermensch", or the "below man".

Frankly, I'm inclined to agree, and as an autistic myself, he's full of it. Autism is largely a small blessing in that it can provide intense ability to focus on limited subjects with profound ability, but otherwise can be socially crippling, and given all the social crap I've seen him get into and even admit to, I'm not shocked in the slightest.

Gillion is also a massive racist, melding these beliefs into his bizarre belief autism makes him special, even though he has provably shown mental instability such as wanting to hurt women and bears an intense and even violent contempt for his own therapist, and given his unstable behavior, he would have been one of the "mental undesirables" considered an unfit member of the Third Reich, ironically enough. Then again, he draws from a variety of racist creeds, including citing the hoax known as the "The Protocols of The Learned Elders Of Zion" as legitimate, even though even during time it was written even many who agreed with it in principle considered it a forgery.

He also lacks any consistency, claiming to hate women yet desiring to be transgender, claiming and discarding whatever label of mental health or instability he deems appropriate at the time to win his arguments, even betraying parts of his own established beliefs of autism and racism if he feels those arguments do not suit his intellectual superiority or ability to maintain it at any time.

In conclusion, I've found him to be a fool wearing the clothes of the smart, and Nietzsche once mentioned something to the effect that one must cast aside their pretensions if they wish to be a superior man, advice I would sincerely advise Mr. Gillion to pay due heed.

If anyone wishes to face palm with me at this guy, you can find his Kiwi Farms thread here:

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Due to tons of scripting hassles that stymied me for the longest time, I had to chop out so many features I did not want to sacrifice for any reason, but that is now behind me and fixed.

However, even though it's been a very long time since I release DQ1 Remake 2.00, I will be taking even longer to polish up 2.20 for release, skipping 2.10 entirely, for the following reasons:

* I plan to move all builds of the game thus far to a MEGA account for easier downloading. All future builds will be added to it as well.

* I plan to make better use of a lot of features I added by haven't utilized too much of yet, like hi-res icons for weapons, armor, and items. For this purpose, I have had to import a lot of new art, fortunately most was upscaled resources already on hand and public domain materials repurposed for RPG Maker use.

* Enemy HP bars have been added and confirmed stable. I wanted this feature in earlier builds, removed it for various reasons, but now I'm confident they work fine.

* Noticed all sorts of various art glitches that required fixes.

* I have gotten a lot better at my use of events, plan to redo some of the older, clunkier events from my young and stupid days.

* Since I intend on making a sequel, the graphics are getting overhauled and streamlined for that purpose.

* The Achievements feature has been removed since I never got a lot of mileage out of it. It will be restored in a later build, but I have no use for it at present since some of it's functions do not work well with all the fixes I had to do to fix the other scripting and modifying it would take even longer than it already has, and I'm frankly DONE with scripting crap, I want to move onto other things.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

I finally managed to stamp out all remaining issues with my currency scripting, finally. Also cleaned up some earlier areas with misplaced tiling, and have added a few new NPCs to a few areas.

I plan on doing a complete private beta test of every area before I release another closed beta, especially since the currency script fixes were so extensive and caused so many hassles I want to make damned sure nothing else is broken.

Saturday, July 2, 2016

In my last blog post, I mentioned some bizarre bugs cropped up with DQ1 Remake 2.10. These all seem fixed now, especially since I removed some redundant code, reorganized the script list, and fixed a few problem child variables.

A few features seem a bit nonfunctional now (nothing serious or gamebreaking), going to try getting them back up, and afterwards I'll resume working on it again.

And speaking of game development, I popped into Brianna Wu's Twitch Stream after hearing about it briefly and left a positive comment about how I intended to purchase it on Steam, and how I was impressed it was in a playable form, especially since even many of Wu's own Kickstarter backers were wondering if they had been scammed of late.

I was blocked immediately, which is weird, since I was very polite, and outright trolls were allowed to post whatever they pleased. Later, Wu posted an edited screencap of a small portion of the Twitch chat (cutting out a lot of stuff like someone repeatedly deadnaming Wu).

I'll reserve my opinion on the motives for all this, but I can say this: While I'm not much for using Twitch or livestreaming in general, I have a thicker skin, and I don't believe in blocking even my harshest critics so long as they try to be civil, and assuming I do a livestream or someone else does one on something I work on, I would hope for reciprocal courtesy.